Saratoga News
Cover Story
Photograph by George Sakkestad
William Treseder shares a laugh with Dave Fishbaugh, West Valley College's vice president of instruction, during the school's graduation ceremony on May 25.
Proud Pledge
West Valley College valedictorian and U.S. Marine William Treseder has every reason to be proud
By Shannon Burkey
William Treseder looked like most of the other graduates at the West Valley College commencement ceremony on May 25. A gold tassle dangled over the right side of his mortarboard cap, and a gold sash draped around his neck, in stark contrast to his black graduation gown.
But the path the college's valedictorian has taken to where he is today is dramatically different from that of his fellow graduates.
It wasn't too long ago that instead of textbooks and backpacks, Treseder carried a rifle and wore fatigues. And though it wasn't in his plans, he will once again don the uniform of the United States Marine Corps, the organization that helped to turn him from a rebellious youth into a man standing before his peers as their valedictorian.
Treseder has been accepted into UC-Berkeley and UC-San Diego, and he's wait-listed at Stanford University, but he has not had an easy road.
"I barely graduated from high school," says Treseder, who left his high school in Davis with a 1.7 grade point average. "I was just your standard apathetic kid, I suppose. I was kind of aimless and I just didn't care."
Treseder admits he didn't try because he just didn't want to, but he always had a love of learning and reading that was instilled in him at an early age by his parents.
"I learned more from talking to them than I did from my teachers. I never wanted to do homework; I just didn't care about stuff like that," he says.
During a career fair in his junior year of high school, something caught his attention that would alter his path. Along with the various companies at the fair, there were recruiters from the different branches of the military. Only one stood out for Treseder.
"I remember this really big guy with these huge arms standing at the podium. He scanned the crowd and said, 'None of you are good enough for the Marine Corps,' then walked away," Treseder says. "That was my first real exposure to the Marine Corps. I had this impression that it made men."
Upon graduation from high school, Treseder made the decision to join the Marine Corps.
"It's funny, but even at that point when I was relatively untested, I knew that if I was going to do something like the military, I wasn't going to half-ass it. I was going to do my best and join the hardest service there was," he says.
The first recruiter laughed him out of the office.
"I was too heavy to join the Marine Corps, or any of the services," he says.
That just made him want it more and encouraged him to really work to get it. On May 21, 2001, 11 months after his high school graduation, he became a Marine.
"When I started training, I couldn't even do one pull-up, then 3 1/2 years into my four-year enlistment I won a pull-up contest," he says. "That was indicative of my mindset. I constantly tried to improve myself. A lot of the guys already had the physical part down, but for me it was a trial."
Military life was a wake-up call for Treseder, and life as a Marine was a long way from the life he had previously known.
"Boot camp was like a 13-week-long cold shower. It's so different from the life you are exposed to as a suburban kid," he says. "There are very few guys who go through it without losing motivation or questioning why they're doing it."
As a Marine, Treseder excelled. He was selected to serve at Marine Barracks Washington, the Marine Corps' oldest active post. It's located in Washington, D.C., and is also known as 8th and I.
At 8th and I, Treseder was a member of the color guard that performed more than 1,000 ceremonies annually. He was promoted to ceremonial drill instructor after his first year, then became the drill master in charge of training all Marines who came into the program after him.
Though he was successful at his job, he says he had mixed feelings about it.
"As an enlisted Marine, nobody cares what you want to do, you just get sent where the Marine Corps needs you and that's the source of a lot of frustration," Treseder says. "From a civilian standpoint, you might say, 'Wow, that's great, you didn't have to go to Iraq.' But when you're a Marine, you're trained to fight. It's good in the sense that you're not put in harm's way, but it's horrible in the sense that you know you didn't go over there when you've lost lots of friends who did. It's a mixed bag of emotion for everyone stationed at 8th and I."
Four years after enlisting in the Marine Corps, Treseder was a different person. The Corps, he says, changed his life and he was now ready for a new adventure.
Treseder's grandparents moved to Los Gatos in 1948, shortly after his grandfather finished a tour of duty with the Army in World War II. Shortly after leaving Marine Corps active duty, Treseder and his father took a trip to visit his grandmother, who still lives in the same house she and her husband built 59 years ago on Bella Vista Avenue.
He was thinking seriously about school then, so Treseder's father took him to visit West Valley College, the school he had attended before transferring to Stanford in the early 1960s.
"I was blown away by how amazingly beautiful it is. I just walked around the campus and liked it more and more," he says. "I decided within an hour of setting foot on the campus that I wanted to go there."
As it turned out, his grandmother, Ruth Treseder, also needed someone to stay with her. His grandfather had died in 1995, and it was about that time that his grandmother began to lose her eyesight.
In the past two years, the two have forged an amazing friendship, each helping the other out.
"She's the most independent blind person you'll ever meet that wasn't born blind," he says. "She's adapted in nothing short of a mind-boggling way."
Each day the two can be seen strolling hand-in-hand down Bella Vista Avenue with their dog. Treseder also reads the mail and the newspaper to his grandmother, and twice a week accompanies her to church.
Still, he claims he gets much more out of the relationship than he gives.
"She helps me out a heck of a lot more than I help her out, despite what she might tell people," he says.
Treseder says she is very wise and often offers him different perspectives. Often times he discusses his school lectures with her to get more of a well-rounded idea of the issues being discussed.
"I'll always rehash lectures with her as we're walking and talking and she always comes up with these simple statements that cause me to totally rethink a position that I was going to take," he says. "When she and I would discuss things, I would be much better prepared for school the next day."
The time the two spend together has also meant a lot to Ruth Treseder.
"I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed having that young man around," she says. "I'm so very proud of him. He's had to make the transition from military to civilian life and he's done it so well."
When it came to school, just as he did in the military, Treseder excelled. After two years he graduated with honors and received an associate's degree in economics and liberal arts.
For a kid who "barely made it out of high school," he had come a long way.
"I don't think that a normal student can go to school for 22 years uninterrupted. I think it's a really bad idea and I'm glad I took the time off," he says.
He is also glad he took the community college route and attributes it to a great deal of his success.
"I don't wonder for a second if it was the best thing to do," he says. "I know more after two years of going to West Valley College than I would have if I had gone to any UC. My bachelor's degree will come from that other university, either Stanford or Berkeley, but it's a combination of so many other things."
As his last year at West Valley began to wind down, Treseder's father took him on a cruise for spring break. The day he returned, a package was waiting for him and its contents would change the course of his life.
Treseder was one of the many Marine reserves being called back to active duty.
"It's weird because it hits you kind of hard; it hit me kind of hard. You get this feeling in the middle of your chest. It's an awakening realization that your life's going to be put on hold, but I don't think I really felt anything," he says.
When he reports for duty in October, one month after he should have started college, he will be attached to the First Marine Expeditionary Force. And though he never saw combat in his first tour of duty, this time, he says, he will most likely be sent to Iraq.
Still, he is not left wondering why the Marine Corps is doing this to him at a time when he should be preparing for a new, exciting life at one of the state's top universities. In his mind he still feels like he owes them.
"I'm not going to get upset because there is nothing I can do about it," he says. "That's the way I've lived the last 2 1/2 years as I've seen the war get progressively worse. I knew the chances were pretty good that I would get that letter. But living your life in fear of getting a letter that's telling you you're going to have to go somewhere is the wrong way to live."
Ruth Treseder knew the day would be coming when her grandson would be leaving her, but she says she wishes it were for different reasons.
"I wish he didn't have to go and could carry on with his schooling and his life here. But he's very manly about it and feels he needs to live up to his responsibility," she says. "He's going to do what's right and he knows it's not going to hurt him."
Some people might be bitter about the timing, but Treseder says he wouldn't even be thinking about Berkeley or Stanford had it not been for the Marine Corps.
"Going from where I was in high school to the person I am right now is definitely a combination of upbringing and school, but a lot of it has to do with the Marine Corps--it's a crucible. It literally forges people, and I'm not capable of feeling angry at the Marine Corps for recalling me because it's just time in my life. But it's time in my life that would not have been spent constructively if I had never gone into the Marine Corps," he says.
The Marine Corps has made him who he is and paved the way for who he will become, and Treseder says he will proudly pay it back for all it's done for him.
